Facebook gives users many tools for controlling what personal information is displayed to friends and others. But if you have lots of Facebook friends, you probably don’t want to create privacy settings for each person you know. However, Facebook allows you to create groups of friends, and you can specify privacy settings for these groups.
As an example, suppose you want to make your cell phone number available to personal friends, but you don’t want business contacts to see it. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »
In the current economy, business networking is more important than ever — we need to use lots of different techniques for finding clients. Social networks can be a great addition to our marketing toolboxes. Since I started actively using social networks (only a year and a half ago!), I’ve reconnected with old friends, and have gotten quite of bit of business that can be directly attributed to connections that were facilitated through these networks.
But social networks can also be great time-wasters, too. However, If you focus on the marketing aspects of the networks, the time spent using them can consist of, as Meryl says, “zero-guilt activities.” Here are some tips for using social networks as effective marketing tools. Read the rest of this entry »
When working on-site, it’s reasonably easy to maintain your employer’s or client’s confidentiality. But what about security in your home office? OK, so your dinner guests aren’t likely to be covert operatives for your employer’s largest competitor, angling to steal company secrets between the appetizer and the main course. But some employers are extremely eager to ensure that remote workers are geared up to protect their confidentiality. Are you?
Some contracts will spell out confidentiality requirements, and some jobs come with a clear non-disclosure agreement attached. But what if you don’t have a written explanation of what your employer or client wants? Here are the crucial aspects I considered in making privacy my priority. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier December saw the launch of Cogi (pronounced co-jee), an audio recording and transcription service in the mould of QTech’s reQall and SkyDeck, bringing a potentially a valuable note taking tool for web workers.
The US-based service enables users to capture the audio content of any phone call or conference calls in their entirety for later transcription to text by the service. Users can also markup parts of the call for particular emphasis during the transcription process. Apparently marking up such segments of a call is as simple as hitting a touchtone keypad to issue stop and start commands, though I’m sure a visual aid to this would be a welcome future addition.
Read the rest of this entry »
Can the internet public know more about you than you would like? According to an article at New Scientist, there’s a company that uses software to analyze blogs and forum posts to find out a blogger’s age, gender, and interests. Web workers who are avid users of Twitter also let the public know what they’re up to most of the day. Here at WWD, we also discussed the lack of privacy of the average web user when it comes to their browsing activity.
How do we maintain privacy when we work on such a public platform?
Read the rest of this entry »
The creation of Address Book 2.0 – the evolution of contacts applications into something more distributed, social and elegant – is a prize being hotly contested by many startups. Just recently, Web Worker Daily has examined Soocial, ContactHero and some of the privacy pitfalls of web-based contact books.
The latest to join the fray is Cellity’s Address Book 2.0, launched earlier this month, at the LeWeb’08 conference in Paris. The service promises to centralize and synchronize a user’s communication points from sources as diverse as Outlook, Twitter, cellphones and social networks.
Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday Google introduced a ‘remote signout’ feature for Gmail, providing a capability that sets an inportant precendent for web-based applications and indeed web workers.
Most web workers tend to hop between multiple devices to access our web applications; Gmail is a great case in point with multiple interfaces mechanisms spread across web, mobile, IMAP and POP3 formats, however it’s easy to lose track of where you’re signed in and compromise a little of your privacy and security if you’re not careful.
Remote Signout enables Gmail users to keep track of recent sessions by IP address and remotely logoff from any of those sessions if the time or location seems suspect.
Gmail inboxes, where the feature is being rolled out progressively, will include a new item in the footer labeled ‘This account is open in x other locations’ with a link to a more detailed view, as illustrated here to the left. Of course, you’ll need to know your own IP addresses to understand if any unauthorized usage is taking place, so it’s not the best user experience, though it works and is a welcome feature.
More significantly Remote Signout sets an important precedent for all web applications – namely that such a feature should be a design pattern employed in all web applications.
Oftentimes the only indication a user has of malicious use is when unusual things begin to happen within their services, in real life, or the arrival of unsolicited password reminder email in their inboxes! By wiring in the means to audit access usage of an application, one of the barriers to policing your personal security and privacy is lowered, enabling us all to be just a little more preemptively vigilant.
Learn more about Gmail’s remote signout feature at Google’s Gmail blog…
Facebook has been pilloried for not caring enough about our privacy. But now they face a call to offer data portability, something that could, if not carefully designed, compromise the privacy we so wanted last year.
Facebook disabled blogger Robert Scoble’s account after he ran automated scripts against the site. The site’s Terms of Service say that you agree not to “use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site.”
The general consensus seems to be that this was Scoble’s data and so he should be able to do whatever he likes with it. But that information he’s trying to get wasn’t all his. Apparently he wanted information about his “social graph”: the friendships he has recorded on Facebook and profile data about those friends.
Even if Scoble’s Facebook friends agreed to let him view their data on Facebook, they didn’t agree to let him take that information wherever he wants to do with what he wants. He could use a screen scraping program to grab data that they consider just-among-friends and stick it out in public without any regard for their privacy settings. You might say, “Scoble wouldn’t do that” but it’s Facebook’s responsibility to see that it doesn’t happen.
Data portability could be designed into Facebook in such a way that it doesn’t compromise user’s privacy. At the very least, an opt-in to profile sharing outside Facebook would need to be provided. Allowing uncontrolled screen scraping is not the answer.
Facebook gives users many tools for controlling what personal information is displayed to friends and others. But if you have lots of Facebook friends, you probably don’t want to create privacy settings for each person you know. However, Facebook allows you to create groups of friends, and you can specify privacy settings for these groups.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
